Little Known Black History Fact: Project C

On May 2, 1963 a large crowd of black teens came rushing through the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church in protest of Bull Connors‘ election and the growing discrimination in Birmingham. The strategy to combat the racist policy and associated deaths was labeled as Project C (for Confrontation). This strategy would include the use of more children.

The Birmingham police arrested over 700 children and adults that same day. Among them was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This was the period in which King wrote his “Letters from Birmingham Jail.”

The next day, over 1,000 activists, many of them teens, protested on the streets and were brutally hosed down by order of Bull Connor. Within one week of the Project C protests, 2,500 young people occupied the jails of Birmingham.